y a formless shadow, yet it knows instinctively that it is God.
With a cry that should be heard creation through, it rushes upon Him,
and it knocks itself, spirit as it is, against material terrors. It
clasps the shadow of God, and, lo! it embraces keen flames. It runs up
to Him but it has encountered only fearful demons. It leaps the length
of its chain after Him, but it has only dashed into an affrighting crowd
of lost and cursed souls. Thus is it ever writhing under the sense of
being its own executioner. Thus there is not an hour of our summer
sunshine, not a moment of our sweet starlight, not a vibration of our
moonlit groves, not an undulation of odorous air from our flowerbeds,
not a pulse of delicious sound from music or song to us, but that
hapless unpitiable soul is ever falling sick afresh of the overwhelming
sense that all around it is eternal.

EXTRACT FROM "THE CREATOR AND THE CREATURE."
BY FATHER FABER.

BOOK II. CH. V.

Yet the heavenly joys of the illuminated understanding far transcend the
thrills of the glorified senses. The contemplation of heavenly beauty
and of heavenly truth must indeed be beyond all our earthly standards of
comparison. The clearness and instantaneousness of all the mental
processes, the complete exclusion of error, the unbroken serenity of the
vision, the facility of embracing whole worlds and systems in one calm,
searching, exhausting glance, the Divine character and utter holiness of
all the truths presented to the view--these are broken words which serve
at least to show what we may even 'now indistinctly covet in that bright
abode of everlasting bliss. Intelligent intercourse with the angelic
choirs, and the incessant transmission of the Divine splendours through
them to our minds, cannot be thought of without our perceiving that the
keen pleasures and deep sensibilities of the intellectual world on earth
are but poor, thin, unsubstantial shadows of the exulting immortal life
of our glorified minds above.

The very expansion of the faculties of the soul, and the probable
disclosure in it of many new faculties which have no object of exercise
in this land of exile, are in themselves pleasures which we can hardly
picture to ourselves. To be rescued from all narrowness, and for ever;
to possess at all times a perfect consciousness of our whole undying
selves, and to possess and retain that self-consciousness in the bright
light of God; to feel the supernatural corroborations